As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use, such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Devices, such as IoT devices, typically need to be configured before they can be put to use. Configuration of heterogeneous devices may be performed manually by the end user or by sending configuration information to an interface of the device using some type of communication protocol (e.g., Wifi, ZigBee, Bluetooth, NFC, etc.) that is compatible with the device. However, device settings are usually lost after a hard (factory) reset. In addition, while configuration and operation of a single device is fairly straightforward, maintaining multiple configurations on multiple heterogeneous devices is currently not supported in the industry. In a large-scale IT network connecting possibly thousands of heterogeneous non-standardized network devices that use different communication protocols and operating systems, configuration management presents great challenges to installers and operators alike.
Existing IoT messaging protocols or methods, such as Nest, which exposes a Web API to store device configurations, support only those types of devices that have access to specific platforms (e.g., the Nest platform through the Firebase publish/subscribe mechanism). However, existing approaches do not provide solutions for supporting or managing heterogeneous devices that, for example, support only local (short range) wireless communication.
Therefore, it would be desirable to have information handling system and methods that allow to configure and manage groups of heterogeneous devices across heterogeneous platforms in a normalized fashion. It would further be desirable to have systems and methods that allow independent heterogeneous devices that have similar functionality to have different device configuration settings.